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2 3 2 In The Lady from Shanghai, Rita’s character dies. It was the only death scene the actress had ever played, and occurs at the climax of the story, when she’s been shot and lies struggling on the ground. “I don’t want to die!” she cries out. Hedda Hopper was on the set the day the scene was filmed, but her comments weren’t concerned with Rita’s truly fine acting. “I was there the day Welles wiped up the floor with his wife,” the columnist noted, and she went on to say, “That, in my book, is certainly no way to keep a marriage going.” —Epstein and Morella, 115 I t has been taken for granted too often in the past that film noir is inherently misogynistic, and even if one disagrees, it can hardly be denied that at the heart of the social and moral darkness into which the noir hero is drawn there does often lurk an alluring, venal, devious, and utterly treacherous woman. In some cases, of which I shall argue that Orson Welles’s ἀ e Lady from Shanghai (1947) is one, it is indeed true that the presence of a female character of this kind is synonymous with something that has to be called misogyny, but it is all the more important, for this very reason, to bear in mind two points—one about the representation of women and one about genre—before evaluating the sexual politics of any given example of film noir. In the first place,the fact that a work of art contains a female character who is represented as vicious and destructive cannot in itself be used as evidence that the work in question is either misogynistic or anti-feminist. One of the greatest feminist dramas ever written, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, is built around a woman who can only be described as odious, and both film noir and the woman’s melodrama provide numerous examples of female protagonists whose very monstrousness allows the director to propose a critical analysis of the social conditions which have chaneled powerful energies and a formidable intelligence into destructive, and self-destructive, forms. Bette Davis regularly played characters of this kind, most notably in Beyond the Forest (1949), where King Vidor derives a critique of women’s oppression as audacious as any the cinema has given us from the story of a woman whose values and behavior are, on the face of it, merely reprehensible. Elsewhere, I have suggested that Ann Savage’s character in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945),without doubt the most abrasive fatal woman in the whole of film noir, has been conceived along similar lines, by a director and an actress who are prepared to go just as far as Vidor and Davis in defying the audience to find any means Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: Misogyny in The Lady from Shanghai (1993) 11 Chapter 11.indd 232 1/17/12 10:48 AM 2 3 3 b e t r ay e d b y r i ta h ay w o r t h of liking the heroine. It is not necessary to formulate “positive images” of female strength, resistance, or independence in order to produce a narrative that criticizes patriarchy from a woman’s point of view, and many works of the greatest dramatic and ideological power have chosen instead to represent the tragic waste or perversion of a woman’s struggle for autonomy and self-definition in the context of an implacably hostile and oppressive culture. Secondly, generic character types—like all the conventional tropes, motifs, and structures associated with a genre—do not have any fixed, definitive dramatic significance or ideological content. The meaning of a convention is primarily determined by the specific narrative context in which it is used, and different directors may well realize the same convention in opposite or contradictory ways,as the comparison between ἀ e Lady from Shanghai and Gilda (1946), directed by Charles Vidor, later in this essay seeks to demonstrate. Certainly, an artist’s leeway with a convention is not infinite, but artistic conventions are at the furthest possible remove from those of mathematics, and they are useful not because of their invariance, but because they conduce to the most complex particularized modifications and inflections of attitude within the general ideological field which they define. This flexibility is always especially marked in the case of generic character types—as it must be if the genre...

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